Polls and Predictive Fallibility

Carol Platt Liebau

9/30/2012 7:49:25 PM - Carol Platt Liebau

It's demoralizing, day after day, to hear the MSM crowing about some poll that is supposedly declaring the election all-but-decided in favor of Barack Obama. What's more, it's frankly hard to believe: The economy is tanking (with the unemployment rate expected to have gone up again in September), the Mideast is on fire, and a majority of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. Yet voters are salivating to go out and pull the lever for Barack Obama and get more of the same? Really?

The long and short of it is that no one is really sure what's going on. As a friend's father once said to him before he competed in a swim meet, "Don't look -- swim!" Obsessively focusing on the polls can slow you down in the same kind of way . . . you spend so much time figuring out where you are relative to the competition that you slow yourself down.